We are so proud to welcome you! You are going to love it. Okay, so I would start with iWork because you may need some word processing, spreadsheet and presentation apps. You could get Microsoft Office for Mac, but iWork is cheaper and it can export to standard office formats for sharing and it can import the formats as well.

I love OmniGraffle for flowcharts, but that depends on what you might be doing with the Mac. I use MindNode for mindmapping, it’s free! I love Evernote, it’s free but you can upgrade the account, it syncs with your smartphone. I have Things for a to-do list and project management and it syncs to your iPhone.

congrats Andrew on moving to the bright side 🙂 I’m a long time Microsoft-centric software developer and I switched to a MBP about a year ago and I’m very pleased with my decision. I love Mac OS X, even Windows 7 runs better in my Mac.

When my wife started school a few years ago, I got her a macbook. I was also deciding on whether to get iWorks or MS Office. In the end, I decided to get MS Office and it has worked out quite well for class. Not only do most instructors use Word for their syllabus, but have many classes have presentations in powerpoint format. One thing you may want to check is whether or not your wife’s school have a student discount for MS Office. If so, it will probably be cheaper than buying from the App Store…just a thought.

Free mind dump software. I use this for everything. You can take notes, audio notes, photos …. it then syncs over the web and your mobile phone so you always have the information with you. I can not recommend it highly enough. It also has the best search I have ever found.

The best backup software I have ever found and it creates a bootable drive.

iWork vs MS Office

Personally, I prefer iWork over MS Office any day of the week. I have both and I do use both, but I find Pages, Numbers, and Keynote far easier and less bloated then Office. Pages is far easier to design in.